


Freckles are Stars.

by fearless_seas



Category: 18th Century CE RPF, American History RPF, American Revolution RPF
Genre: Crying, Death, Emotional, John doesn't want to forget Alexander, John is dying, M/M, Memories, They both each other so much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-16
Updated: 2017-01-16
Packaged: 2018-09-18 00:14:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9352952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fearless_seas/pseuds/fearless_seas
Summary: John wasn't ready to die without saying goodbye, and death it not proud of the men he has stole. Death stole John Laurens, who wasn't ready to go.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Owlgirl155](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Owlgirl155/gifts), [Miss_Bubblegum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_Bubblegum/gifts), [LamiltonsBurr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LamiltonsBurr/gifts).



> August 18th, 1782: the day god took a man who scratched his way from life with three bullets in his soul.

         _**August 18th, 1782:** the day god took a man who scratched his way from life with three bullets in his soul. _

 

______________________

 

         John Laurens wrote poems on the curves of Alexander Hamilton’s skin. Every freckle on Alexander’s skin was a star from which he could make galaxies from the flecks. In the back of his mind, he counted every last one, silently adding them to the constellations in the sky. Gathering the careful breath in his fingertips. Fire cast a shadow upon the cabin wall, tracing shapes and figures into the wood. Like a melody, John wished to recite all his dreams, return Alexander’s heart in a beautiful box.

_I'm fading fast._

            There was something about dying that made one recall forgotten memories like colors flashing before his sight. On his back, the grass beneath him was a laying foundation as his weak fingers dug into the earth, willing to burrow away. John soon would be a part of the earth, from his stomach a patch of indigo flowers would form, growing, weaving and intertwining their vines across his chest. Fingers scratched at his sides, nails pressing farther into the soil; it was so peaceful now. Silence was an emblem, a entity he had craved so long. The dust of war had contaminated his lungs and bullets reverberated in the empty cavern of his breast cracking each rib. A fading scar on his left shoulder throbbed, the first art of war ingrained into the splinter of his sheath. There was the fading scent of sweat and salt nipped at the flesh of his tongue. Warnings echoed in his ears, the reckless caress of his stolen heart.

           In a way, he never imagined that he would fall as so many others he has seen. They sucked in a final breath, caught the sun as it shone over the horizon and tried to commemorate the last time they ever saw a sunset. Musing remembrance of times long past. The smoke from a simmering fire, gunpowder and a smile so familiar it was a piecing of himself. Somehow he’d expected Alexander’s face to loom from above, shadowing the heavens in a silhouette of diverse beauty. But Alexander wasn’t here. Alexander wouldn’t graze his knuckles along his cheek or trace the padding of his thumb to wipe away the tears that were streaming down his face.

          John didn’t even comprehend he was crying into his lips tasted of grimy salt. They dried on the dirt that caked his face from the impact of the soil beneath his weight. John’s boots indented the earth beneath his footing when his horse fell and a flash of ruby seared throughout his bones. From the anger, refusal stuck her loin and a lame flower bent like a beast to lap the singular floods of his conception. The first bullet exited from the gun of a boy. But the guns are reticent now, and only smoke fills the clouds. Every bite of frozen, hard steel tore open his case and in the plains of ivory and shamrock, blood of the men waters the surface. They were just pioneers in a chance to make a name--their titles perished in their sunken to the waves. The first dug deep into his thigh. The second bullet christened itself inside his abdomen where it burrowed and grew into a ebony rose and chewed the blood as it flowed. The third shot, just below his heart, the splintering fragments of his ribs spiking the interior of the catacomb.

         There were only moments left in his life. Twenty seven years of a reckless streak were pressed into the fabric his bones. His respire was fading short past his insolence, the feeling of blood choking his own lungs. There was something strange about beaming up at the heavens for the last time, something about the the fresh breeze of wind flowing over his cheeks like mountains of pale roseate sunshine and glowing ice of snow. He'd never noticed these things before. For a twinkling his perception let him only follow the small beauties of life he hadn't yet witnessed. How the dirt felt impressed underneath his nails or how the trees cast shadows and shapes across the rushing field of emerald. John blinked, twitching his cheek bone and attempting to revive.

               John Laurens was unable to find the grace in the world about him. John’s world was Alexander, but even as he was gone, the world would keep spinning on. In the sun above he found Alexander’s crooked smile, the immodest curling of his lips into a sneer, and the specks of dust that coated his cheeks. He wishes that he could imitate Alexander’s freckles, dotting the planet in the magnificent specks. The constellations dotting Alexander’s nose and his heightened cheek bones forever guided him home; they led straight to his lover’s conviction and in there he found solitude--a home within the sky. His freckles were like sparks of scarlet to stain the pale, ashy moonlight. John was aware that he was fading. Death comes in its own time, in its own way. Death is as unique as the individual who experiences it. Between the blood suffocating his lungs, the blood pooling from his stomach, and fragment in the bone of his leg, John had been in many battles, held many angels as they left from where they used to hide in mortality.

           He often found himself wondered where the angels went when he needed to fly; or like the waves crashing in the rolling tides, he would stand, spread his wings to attempt to glide. He’d fall straight down to distant flames, catching fire as the flames licked his wings. Sin cloaked his surface, he’d try to scrub something that could never be brushed off. The loss of feeling began at his feet, covering the muddy boots that Alexander used to wrap his hands around and tug off to throw into a corner. Numbness came from an exhausted oblivion, the quiet chaos. John felt the greatest happiness within their frozen cabin door; glamorous, glorious and a legacy of tears. He’d experienced the greatest sorrow that had ripped him at the core. For John Laurens, he’d been numb before and felt nothing more. He’d been numb for so long he’d forgotten what it was like to break. Now, he felt everything, while he lay dying, all his emotions collided into one awful explosion. The numbness rose from his toes, stealing the the first time he was able to feel.

          _He didn’t want it to go away._

           There was still a man who lived inside his caged soul. Alexander once told him to undress but John didn’t know how, he'd built his walls so high that he could not reach around. Soon he would be as empty as a night sky without the moon, the stars and cosmos to guide him to the inky darkness above the sun. When death comes for John Laurens, he’s _supposed_ to be numb, but he can still feel. He senses Alexander giving up on him in his New York city home with his alluring wife and month old son. Because standing in a crowd, John finds himself being pulled beneath the brick and cobble stone to drown. Silence slaps a hand over his mouth and his legs are being torn. Yet, his ocean eyes glow and to scream for Alexander to tug him out. His knees started to numb next, reaching up to his thighs and pressing light weight against his hips.

             Alexander's nimble, shifting hands sneaking fingers beneath in breeches when candle shine illuminated the cabin walls. The torch matched the hue of his cheeks when Alexander went between his thighs. He was rough because John hid all his poems inside his mouth, behind his neck and across his hips, Alexander found all of these places and drew them out into flesh. Like the moon, he had a side of him so dark the moon didn’t shine and a fragment of himself so cold that the sun could not ignite it. Alexander’s nails tearing up his back created love stories that healed the rouge flesh. They wore their smile like a loaded gun while John lay at the end of the barrel tossing himself closer with every spin of the chamber. The edges of his fingers came next, like a cloud of dust that buzzed across the surface of his skin. They were fingers Alexander used to kiss, dragging his lips painfully slowly against the coarse edges of his nails. Fingers that would wrap themselves around Alexander’s curls, his moan silenced by a hand covering his mouth and John pressing further. When he watched his knuckles in Alexander’s mouth as he was on his knees he could recall vividly how his freckles were like flecks of fire, flames that spread up his hand and scolded his skin. His eyes decided to burn, reflecting like fire, he chose to set John on fire instead of watching him burn.

          _How could you not be a poet when his your sung verses and lyrics to me?_

         The darkness dripped indolently through his back, a posterior where Alexander’s finger nails drew scars and where a comforting appendage would rest in the  figure. Places where bite marks became clustered into cherry blossoms on his shoulders and the gaze down towards Alexander as he glanced up with those large beautiful orbs was so far. The lilac marks bitten into his neck were little footprints that were left to remind him that _he_  had been there. John longed to undress his intellect; but he was afraid to be naked, feared Alexander may see the bite scars on his heart. John has bites on his tongue from all the words he never said. John did not understand Alexander’s infatuation with placing his lips against his neck until one day when their teeth grazed his pulse. John realized that instead of choosing to ripe of the veins and leave him to bleed he had embraced him Alexander drunk life into his now dead lips because he wrote him love notes on the curves and grooves of his skin. When the numbness took motion in his back and climbed up his neck from his chest, it stole the memories of these pressings against his sheath while bringing darkness to the golden lashes at his soul.

         In time John would forget all of these things and consign them to oblivion. The butterflies in his stomach may turn into wasps, for when his stomach flutters and his heart aches, sometimes it did not feel like love--he knew it as pain. Soon the butterflies in his stomach would cease flight and the cream roses set to wilt. Alexander was a firework flying across the sky, John fell into the trap of its flickering colors until it simply turned to ashes that tumbled from the heavens. Alexander was delicious and John was greedy: always hungry and thirsting for more. He inhaled the alkaline sweat of his lover’s percussion. Even as the memories made his senses burn, he wouldn’t trade knowledge of Alexander for all the money in the world.

          _He was too beautiful._

          Oceans of sunlight washed over him, meadows bloomed across his limbs, stardust pulsed across his hips and planets collided splendidly in his eyes every time he was kissed. John at no time allowed himself to cry, but as the meadow sang out in fading smoke and bullet ash of a flooded battlefield, Alexander would lite a cigar with the bundles of tears racing down his cheeks after his lips somehow found strength to stretch into a smile. John thought that chaos was a beautiful stone that always crashed into the earth. With all these memories washing over him like feral waves to his wisdom, hopeless and loveless, he’d never see the currents rolling and tossing in the harbor or never bare witness to his daughter's giggle because he did not give a damn. He’d never shut his eyes, toss his neck back, arching his hips as his lover etched stitches into the sharded fragment of his soul.

          Fading in the valley, whispers of branches as they blow, in the candlelight a trial of words leaped across the walls and told stories he’d never heard before. All his life John wondered what it was like to die, feel his tears as they dry into the dust of his exterior in tidal waves of filth. One eventually goes numb, because one cannot break a heart that’s already broken or mend a heart which has been shattered. Somewhere in the past a piece is forgotten, without that one shard it will not fit together; it will only break once again. The castles in the clouds that Alexander promised he’d take him to somewhere were dropping brick and soot, raining down from nebulas.

         His chest quivered, shoulders tremoring as his body began to shut down. Soon he wouldn’t be able to move. John Laurens once got caught in the hurricanes of Alexander Hamilton’s eyes, he still was slipping beneath the waves with no one to pull him through. Twilight was settling across the plain, a sob reverberated up his neck. Soon the last place he could feel pain was in the tears casting waves of dusted gold across the flake and tear of his skin. He realized that no matter how bright he shines, how beautiful the flames appear across his skin, they will always leave you charred; he will always end up burnt. Alexander had an inferno in his fingertips, when his eyes of royal stripped up to meet his own, John remembered why the world kept spinning or why he wasn’t shot just yet; the atoms were colliding because of fate.

           His unconquerable soul had fallen into the clutches of circumstance, he did not wince or cry out. In a path of wrath and forgotten loins, John Laurens dug himself into the dirt and cried. He cried for a man he’d known for four years, he sobbed in fire of pain and screamed in the shadow of shame. He hollered for the auburn strips of hair he coiled around his fingertips. He bellowed for his lovers touch to guide him on his way. The faded scratches in the rip of his back were beginning to bleed, his gut falling into the abyss.

          _He didn’t want to die._

         His chest heaved in the cheek colored light of unsound glory with the salty stain of tears running into his cheeks. His lips lost their feelings, in second he’d forget what it was like to feel Alexander’s touch. He waited for Alexander’s hair to irritate his chin each night, pressing deeper into discomfort. They sowed and bent a new decorated grin in the place of his lips. His lover was everything that he had fought for until he realized that he wasn’t ready for war. He wasn’t ready to be scorched and he wasn’t ready to let go. He wasn’t prepared for his vision to roll back and dismiss everything of what has passed. He could feel his last gasp drawing from his lungs and his head sitting silent; the blood trickling from his veins at a recess. He didn’t yearn to obliterate Alexander's gentle caress or his rough shaking breath against the shell of his ear. He wasn’t ready to catch the sky fading or become caught mesmerized in his dreams from above. He wasn’t ready to go until he saw Alexander’s eyes once more. He wasn’t equipped until he inhaled Alexander’s hair, the peaches and marigold flowers along with white colored poses. He wasn’t wired to depart until he felt Alexander’s legs wrapped around his waist as he pressed him up against a wall to taste his misery with fluttering eyelashes.

         John couldn’t sense anything anymore as he shuddered to an end. Like gangrene it spread up from his toes, biting his flesh, up to his neck, nibbling his fingers. Death is not proud of the men he has stole or the hearts he has stopped and lessons he’s told. Death took John Laurens as he gazed at the celestials. The heavens envied Alexander’s eyes, fire scolded the freckles the flecked across his lover’s nose. Perhaps John ached for freedom, for that’s the haven in that man’s eyes, it was given as a present from the fabric of the sky.  John never would get to say goodbye or return the piece of Alexander who has jumped into his own gaze. When John submits to darkness he wouldn’t be alone, a part of Alexander would always be with him on the day god took him home.

          John stood in the darkness, waiting all this time, while he damned the dead, trying to survive--he wasn’t ready to die. He wasn’t ready to pass. Drawing a final breath, he tumbled into death’s open arms as he thought of Alexander and his eyes joined the stars. Freckles flaked and sprinkled like star dust on Alexander's skin. John had nightmares each night, not of the war or being shot or chased, but always worrying one day he'd forget each freckle on his lover's face. They spilled in waterfalls across his shoulders, splashed over his cheeks. Harvesting sapphires above, staring love into his eyes, he'd loved the way he captivated his fingertips on those freckles that clouded over him. Smile Alexander, after the leaves fall and display all the flaws, John still loves that beauty of Autumn painted along his cheeks. 

         “I’m not ready…”, his voice whispered feebly to the trees. It was carried away by the wind, carried to _him_.  A last tear stroked his cheek and fell to the dirt covered earth. The sky wasn’t the last thing he saw, the sky was Alexander’s eyes and that’s what he saw. The numb shattered his heart, _it was so silent now_.

         “Alexander…”

         A heart of gold stopped beating, god broke another man’s heart, because he only takes the best. That man wasn’t ready, he faded too fast with his last wish still dry on his tongue. Death stole John Laurens, fate shoved him to the ground, love shattered his heart, glory spoiled his spirit and broke his soul. There was a road to eternity, a cobblestone path, death has taken many men who fought bloody crafts. They willed to take Alexander, just so John's heart could rest. That very same night Alexander blinked up at the moon, believing in his chest that John was watching it too.

         But John was gone, in a quill and a pen Alexander wrote a letter to heaven that would never arrive. Death of a thief who had stolen his soul. Nobody would know that John never wanted to pass. He didn’t long to go until he saw Alexander’s eyes, felt his gaze on his back or colored his sky with his dream. A tree on a hill sits, underneath the dirt where roses are blue and thorns prick one of blood, a man is buried with vines twisting his skin and dirt underneath his nails as he scratched his way from life dreaming of the only man he ever loved. 

  
         He never got to say goodbye.

**Author's Note:**

> Please comment, I read every single one. Tell me what you think. My tumblr is @sonofhistory


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